Hopes fading for millions of children in poverty trap

Lifting millions of children out of poverty by 2020 by relying on more parents finding work will be an impossible task, a new report predicts.

Even if increased numbers of parents get jobs and work longer hours, the target of cutting the figure by five per cent would be missed.

The picture painted in the report by the Social Mobility And Child Poverty Commission suggests 3.5million children will remain desperately poor.

Former Labour minister Alan Milburn, who heads the commission, said it was a farce that ministers had been unable to agree on how to measure the problem.

He added: ‘The government’s approach falls far short of what is needed to reduce, yet alone end, child poverty in our country. Our new research shows that the gap between the objective of making child poverty history and the reality is becoming ever wider.’

According to the commission, absolute poverty will be at roughly the same level in 2020 as it was in 2010/11 – the first decade it will have failed to drop since records began in 1961.

The report’s authors said that even the most optimistic forecasts of more parents working and wages rising suggest the target for cutting relative poverty ‘is a long way from being met’.

Supplementing work and wages with more extensive childcare and universal credit payments offered the best opportunity, they added.

Save the Children director of poverty Will Higham called for ‘a concrete plan to tackle low wages, rising prices and social security cuts’.

But the Department of Work and Pensions insisted it was committed to ending child poverty by 2020 ‘by tackling worklessness, low earnings and educational failure’.